Magisto Turns Your Long, Boring Videos Into Share-Worthy Clips

Magisto is a web app that, simply put, makes your videos worth sharing. You feed Magisto your long, unedited video and Magisto analyzes the footage, takes the “gist” of it and delivers an edited down version with all the good bits that you’ll be proud to share with your friends.

If you’re like most digital consumers out there, you’ve got loads of video stored away on your computer hard drive, shot on your Flip or your mobile phone. You aren’t uploading the videos to YouTube to share because, for the most part, your videos are too long and nobody would want to sit through them to see the few interesting parts. But you don’t want to throw them away either because they do contain at least a few interesting, memorable and entertaining bits. That’s where Magisto comes in. Magisto is a web app that, simply put, makes your videos worth sharing. You feed Magisto your long, unedited video and Magisto analyzes the footage, takes the “gist” of it and delivers an edited down version with all the good bits that you’ll be proud to share with your friends.

How does it work? Basically, you select the video you’d like to upload, create a title, choose a soundtrack and let Magisto do the work for you. According to a company description, “Magisto thoroughly analyzes your video, understands it, selects the most interesting parts and makes it look amazing by adding special effects and artistic touches to it. The entire process is completely automatic.” It’s all the benefits of video editing without any of the work.

To see Magisto in action, just check out the Before and After videos below:

Before Magisto:

After Magisto:

Magisto is currently in closed alpha, but you can sign up for an invitation if you’d like to try the service out for yourself. The first Social Times readers to click here and sign up will receive invitations to the private Alpha.

Magisto CEO and Founder Oren Boiman told me that they have gotten a great response from their alpha users thus far. “People are amazed to get a professionally edited and produced clip of their work after only a minute. The clips are being shared on Facebook and are getting many responses.” He tells me that Magisto users are uploading video from all over the world of family, pets, trips friends and more. But that’s not all. Oren tells me, “People are creating instant professional video commercials…creating clips from media sources as tributes to their favorite celebrities” and more. He says, “They later send it to the celeb via Twitter and the celebrity responds to the fan, sure that he just spent days of work to create the video clip.” In actuality, it took under a minute with Magisto.

I also asked Oren what he had to say to people who might compare the service to platforms like Animoto. When I first saw Magisto in action, I couldn’t help but make the comparison to platforms that create automated slide shows. Oren told me, “Slideshow applications like Animoto are great if you want to share a slideshow of your photos. Alternatively, it is also very easy to share the photos themselves on Facebook and other platforms. With video it’s completely different. Raw video is too long and boring to share and it requires editing and production. Manual editing is too time consuming and not fun. Online manual video editing is much worse. If you have video, Magisto is the only service that will make your videos worth sharing in a click.”

If you’ve already tried Magisto out for yourself, let us know what you thought of it in the comments. If you haven’t tried it out, what do you think of the idea?

Megan O’Neill is the resident web video enthusiast here at Social Times. Megan covers everything from the latest viral videos to online video news and tips, and has a passion for bizarre, original and revolutionary content and ideas.